Private citizen suits and public enforcement: Substitutes or complements?

Christian Langpap and Jay Shimshack

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2010, vol. 59, issue 3, 235-249

Abstract: Every major domestic environmental statute provides for citizen suits yet we know little about their implications. This paper's key contribution is systematic micro-level empirical evidence on the extent to which private environmental prosecutions crowd out, or crowd in, public monitoring and public enforcement. We use judicial instruments in an attempt to isolate the causal influence of private enforcement on public enforcement. We find that private citizen suits crowd in public monitoring but significantly crowd out public sanctions.

Keywords: Citizen; suits; Citizen; enforcement; Enforcement; Regulation; Pollution; policy; Crowding; out (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095-0696(10)00021-5
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:59:y:2010:i:3:p:235-249

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is currently edited by M.A. Cole, A. Lange, D.J. Phaneuf, D. Popp, M.J. Roberts, M.D. Smith, C. Timmins, Q. Weninger and A.J. Yates

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().